The Empire Must Die: Russia's Revolutionary Collapse, 1900 - 1917

The window between two equally stifling autocracies - the imperial family and the communists - was open only briefly, in the last couple of years of the 19th century until the end of WWI, by which time the revolution was in full fury. From the last years of Tolstoy until the death of the Tsar and his family, however, Russia experimented with liberalism and cultural openness. Novelists and playwrights blossomed and political ideas were swapped in coffee houses.

The Long Hangover: Putin’s New Russia and the Ghosts of the Past

In
The Long Hangover, Shaun Walker provides new insight into contemporary Russia and its search for a new identity, telling the story through the country's troubled relationship with its Soviet past. Walker not only explains Vladimir Putin's goals and the government's official manipulations of history, but also focuses on ordinary Russians and their motivations. He charts how Putin raised victory in World War II to the status of a national founding myth in the search for a unifying force to heal a divided country, and shows how dangerous the ramifications of this have been.

Collusion: How Russia Helped Trump Win the White House

A gripping exposé about the biggest political scandal of the modern era. Moscow, July 1987. Real-estate tycoon Donald Trump visits Soviet Russia for the first time at the invitation of the government. London, December 2016. Luke Harding meets former MI6 officer Christopher Steele to discuss the president-elect's connections with Russia. Award-winning journalist Luke Harding reveals the true nature of Trump's decades-long relationship with Russia and presents the gripping inside story of the dossier.

Directorate S: The C.I.A. and America's Secret Wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan

Resuming the narrative of his Pulitzer Prize-winning
Ghost Wars, best-selling author Steve Coll tells for the first time the epic and enthralling story of America's intelligence, military, and diplomatic efforts to defeat Al Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan and Pakistan since 9/11.

Hitler's Soldiers: The German Army in the Third Reich

For decades after 1945, it was generally believed that the German army, professional and morally decent, had largely stood apart from the SS, Gestapo, and other corps of the Nazi machine. Ben Shepherd draws on a wealth of primary sources and recent scholarship to convey a much darker, more complex picture. For the first time, the German army is examined throughout the Second World War, across all combat theaters and occupied regions, and from multiple perspectives: its battle performance, social composition, relationship with the Nazi state, and involvement in war crimes and occupation.

The Putin Interviews: Oliver Stone Interviews Vladimir Putin

Supplemented with referential information and culled from more than a dozen interviews with Putin over a two-year period - spanning Stone's first trip to Moscow to meet with NSA whistle-blower Edward Snowden to his most recent visit after the election of President Donald Trump -
The Putin Interviews is based on what journalists, news organizations, and other world leaders have long coveted: extended, unprecedented access to Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Hitler's Spy Chief

Wilhelm Canaris was appointed by Hitler to head the Abwehr (the German secret service) 18 months after the Nazis came to power. But Canaris turned against the Fuhrer and the Nazi regime, believing that Hitler would start a war Germany could not win. In 1938 he was involved in an attempted coup, undermined by British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain. In 1940 he sabotaged the German plan to invade England, and fed General Franco vital information that helped him keep Spain out of the war.

Case Red: The Collapse of France

Even after the legendary evacuation from Dunkirk in June 1940 there were still large British formations fighting the Germans alongside their French allies. After mounting a vigorous counterattack at Abbeville and then engaging a tough defense along the Somme, the British were forced to conduct a second evacuation from the ports of Le Havre, Cherbourg, Brest, and St. Nazaire.
Case Red captures the drama of the final three weeks of military operations in France in June 1940.

The Best and the Brightest

Using portraits of America's flawed policy makers and accounts of the forces that drove them,
The Best and the Brightest reckons magnificently with the most important abiding question of our country's recent history: Why did America become mired in Vietnam, and why did we lose? As the definitive single-volume answer to that question, this enthralling book has never been superseded. It is an American classic.

The House of Government: A Saga of the Russian Revolution

On the 100th anniversary of the Russian Revolution, the epic story of an enormous apartment building where Communist true believers lived before their destruction.
The House of Government is unlike any other book about the Russian Revolution and the Soviet experiment.

Russia: The Wild East: The Complete BBC Radio 4 Series

Power struggles have a constant presence in Martin Sixsmith's story of Russia. Collected here in 50 episodes, he chronicles the Mongol hordes invading in the 13th century, through the iron autocratic fists of successive tsars, to the fall of the Soviet Union and Russia's re-emergence as a superpower. Sixsmith brings his first-hand experience of reporting from Russia in the 1980s and 90s to his narrative, witnessing the critical moment when the Soviet Union lost its grip on power.

Red Notice

November 2009. Sergei Magnitsky is led to an isolation cell in a Moscow prison and beaten to death by eight police officers. His crime? To testify against the Russian Interior Ministry officials involved in a conspiracy to steal $230 million in taxes. Magnitsky’s brutal killing has remained uninvestigated to this day. Red Notice is a searing exposé of the Russian authorities responsible for the murder, slicing deep into the heart of the Kremlin to uncover its sordid truths.

McMafia: Seriously Organised Crime

A riveting, original and comprehensive account of international crime and a brilliant critique of globalisation's dark side. When an appalling and seemingly inexplicable murder shattered the peace of a quiet English suburban street it revealed the extent to which organised crime has now seeped into our lives, often without our knowledge. In his groundbreaking book Misha Glenny takes us on a journey through the new world of international organised crime, from gun runners in Ukraine to money launderers in Dubai, by way of drug syndicates in Canada and cyber criminals in Brazil.

No Man’s Land: 1918, the Last Year of the Great War

From freezing infantrymen huddled in bloodied trenches on the front lines to intricate political maneuvering and tense strategy sessions in European capitals, noted historian John Toland tells of the unforgettable final year of the First World War. In this audiobook, participants on both sides, from enlisted men to generals and prime ministers to monarchs, vividly recount the battles, sensational events, and behind-the-scenes strategies that shaped the climactic, terrifying year.

The Square and the Tower: Networks, Hierarchies and the Struggle for Global Power

What if everything we thought we knew about history was wrong? From the global best-selling author of
Empire,
The Ascent of Money and
Civilization, this is a whole new way of looking at the world. Most history is hierarchical: it's about popes, presidents, and prime ministers. But what if that's simply because they create the historical archives? What if we are missing equally powerful but less visible networks-leaving them to the conspiracy theorists, with their dreams of all-powerful Illuminati?

Fall Out: A Year of Political Mayhem

By the best-selling author of
All Out War, shortlisted for the Orwell Prize 2017. The unmissable account of politics covering Theresa May's time as PM through to the end of the election campaign. Stuffed to the brim with revelation and explanation of political debates and arguments and a superb follow-up to
All Out War.

The Future of War: A History

The Future of War - which covers civil wars to as yet unknown nuclear conflicts, proxy wars (real) to the Cold War (not), fashionably small wars to the War to End All Wars (it didn't) - is filled with insight and fascinating nuggets of military history and culture from one of the most brilliant military and strategic historians of his generation.

Victorious Century: The United Kingdom, 1800-1906

To live in 19th-century Britain was to experience an astonishing series of changes, of a kind for which there was simply no precedent. There were revolutions in transport, communication and work; cities grew vast; and scientific ideas made the intellectual landscape unrecognisable. This was an exhilarating time but also a horrifying one. In his new book, David Cannadine has created a bold, fascinating new interpretation of the British 19th century in all its energy and dynamism, darkness and vice.

Fire and Fury

The first nine months of Donald Trump's term were stormy, outrageous - and absolutely mesmerising. Now, thanks to his deep access to the West Wing, best-selling author Michael Wolff tells the riveting story of how Trump launched a tenure as volatile and fiery as the man himself. In this explosive audiobook, Wolff provides a wealth of new details about the chaos in the Oval Office.

The War of the World: History's Age of Hatred

The world at the beginning of the 20th century seemed for most of its inhabitants stable and relatively benign. Globalising, booming economies married to technological breakthroughs seemed to promise a better world for most people. Instead the 20th century proved to be overwhelmingly the most violent, frightening and brutalised in history, with fanatical, often genocidal warfare engulfing most societies between the outbreak of the First World War and the end of the Cold War. What went wrong?

Unbelievable: My Front-Row Seat to the Craziest Campaign in American History

The NBC journalist who covered - and took fire from - Donald Trump on the campaign trail offers an inside look at the most shocking presidential election in American history. Intriguing, disturbing, and powerful,
Unbelievable is an unprecedented eyewitness account of the 2016 election from an intelligent, dedicated journalist at the center of it - a thoughtful historical record that offers eye-opening insights and details on our political process, the media, and the mercurial 45th president of the United States.

Stormtroopers: A New History of Hitler's Brownshirts

Germany's Stormtroopers engaged in a vicious siege of violence that propelled the National Socialists to power in the 1930s. Known also as the SA or Brownshirts, these "ordinary" men waged a loosely structured campaign of intimidation and savagery across the nation from the 1920s to the "Night of the Long Knives" in 1934, when Chief of Staff Ernst Röhm and many other SA leaders were assassinated on Hitler's orders.

The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11

A sweeping narrative history of the events leading to 9/11, a groundbreaking look at the people and ideas, the terrorist plans and the Western intelligence failures that culminated in the assault on America. Lawrence Wright's remarkable book is based on five years of research and hundreds of interviews that he conducted in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Sudan, England, France, Germany, Spain, and the United States.

The Templars

The Knights Templar were the wealthiest, most powerful - and most secretive - of the military orders that flourished in the crusading era. Their story - encompassing as it does the greatest international conflict of the Middle Ages, a network of international finance, a swift rise in wealth and influence followed by a bloody and humiliating fall - has left a comet's tail of mystery that continues to fascinate and inspire historians, novelists and conspiracy theorists. Unabridged edition read by Dan Jones.

Audible Editor Reviews

"I read this book in one night.... It leaves a profoundly scary impression: [Putin's court is the] real
House of Cards." (Lev Lurie, writer and historian)

Publisher's Summary

All the Kremlin's Men is a gripping narrative of an accidental king and a court out of control. Based on an unprecedented series of interviews with Vladimir Putin's inner circle, this book presents a radically different view of power and politics in Russia. The image of Putin as a strongman is dissolved. In its place is a weary figurehead buffeted - if not controlled - by the men who at once advise and deceive him.

The regional governors and bureaucratic leaders are immovable objects, far more powerful in their fiefdoms than the president himself. So are the gatekeepers - those officials who guard the pathways to power - on whom Putin depends as much as they rely on him. The tenuous edifice is filled with all of the intrigue and plotting of a Medici court, as enemies of the state are invented and wars begun to justify personal gains, internal rivalries, or one faction's biased advantage.

A best seller in Russia, All the Kremlin's Men is a shocking revisionist portrait of the Putin era and a dazzling reconstruction of the machinations of courtiers running riot.

PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying reference material will be available in your Library section along with the audio.

This is a really good retelling of Putin’s rise to power and of the “collective Putin” that has run Russia through the first two decades of the 21st century. It provides a great deal of insight into intrigues and fills in important details missing from many Western analyses.

The only criticism I have is of the narrator. Between his inability to pronounce key names (e.g. he keeps saying “Volushin” in lieu of “Voloshin”) and his unfortunate decision to voice quotations from Russians with an “Ensign Chekhov” accent, he has detracted from an otherwise riveting book.

A fantastic book, a well researched look into the rise of Putin. I encourage everyone, not just Russophiles to take a read. It would do the world a lot of good to understand the political situation in which the world currently stands.

This is such an amazing book. But the reader insisted on doing a Russian accent any time a Russian was speaking. It ended up being super distracting.

4 of 4 people found this review helpful

Ivanhoe

02/02/18

Overall

Performance

Story

"Want to get to know of the inner workings of Kremlin?"

Super interesting story of how Putin get to power in the late 1990’s, and how Putin gordana from being quiet pro-West to recent the Americans and the western politicians. The story is exiting as a Russian “House of Cards”. The topic and the book deserves it own TV-series. I think many Europeans could learn a lot about Russian and European politics from this highly relevant deep dive into the inner workings of Russian politics.

0 of 0 people found this review helpful

A. M.

San Francisco, CA

29/01/18

Overall

Performance

Story

"Pass the weak sauce"

I expected a truthful hard-hitting expose and I got a cold hot dog with relish instead. It's hard to believe that anyone worth their weight as a journalist would write such a bland limp-wristed portrait of the world's most corrupt and criminal leader. Oh, I forgot, he still lives in Russia.

An Anna Politkovskaya he is NOT. I suggest reading something a little less whitewashy like Karen Dawisha, Masha Gessen, or Bill Browder. Anyone who reads this will know less than when they started...

Good narration, though.

0 of 0 people found this review helpful

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